Wednesday, 9 September 2015

Last night’s sunset was rather spectacular. A blood red sun sinking into the reservoir.

This morning we awoke to mist and limited visibility. The mist had lifted by 8am but wasn’t (unfortunately) replaced by the sun. It turned out to be a dry but rather grey day.

The first job for the day was to drop down through Calcutt Top Lock for a 9am appointment with Calcutt Marine. We have noticed the Hurricane isn’t producing the same amount of heat as when it was new. It hadn’t failed, but we thought something might be wrong. I’d already bled all the radiators and there was no airlock. Calcutt are the UK distributors so we had waited until we were in the area before having the heater checked. After describing the symptoms the engineer thought it might be the air compressor. Either I’m good a describing faults or he had previously seen a similar problem because he very quickly identified the problem. He confirmed his assumption by placing an air pressure gauge into the compressor air line. The compressor was only producing 1.5psi. This is enough to run the heater but insufficient to produce a high temperature in the burner. The compressor was removed and disassembled to reveal the problem was a small hole in the rubber diaphragm. After replacing the diaphragm and reassembling the compressor it produced 7.9psi. After running the Hurricane for 20 minutes the radiator pipes were too hot to hold. <success>.

We had just set Calcutt Middle Lock when a boat appeared at the top lock. Rather than waste water, we waited for the boat. nb Rusty Nail was returning to its mooring at Warwick after cruising down to London.

She is a Liverpool Boat built in 1999. We paired up with the crew down the Stockton Flight as far as the Blue Lias Pub where we stopped to take on water and have lunch whilst they carried on.

Jan spotted this vehicle beside the canal between the two flights of locks.

A Citroen I think. Or maybe not?

We gave bad advice to Jaq & Les. The apple trees are beside the Bascote Upper Staircase Lock. We spent 15 minutes scrumping a plastic bag of apples. I used the boat hook to flick the apples off the higher branches whilst Jan did the Emu-bob. Plenty more there if any readers are passing that way.

The green apples are to the right of Jan

Plenty of red apples left. There appears to be a plum tree beside Bascote Middle Lock. After dinner I’ll walk back with the boat hook and plastic bag to check whether they are edible.

Now for Daffy, Dilly, Dopy, Dummy & Duh. Jan was attempting to close the towpath side lower gate after I had exited Bascote Middle Lock. However Daffy & Dilly swan decided to take their children into the lock. We had to leave the gates slightly open with the daft swans inside the lock.

They would have been able to swim back out but a passing runner decided to push the gate shut. There wouldn’t have been enough room in the lock for the swans to fly out so I walked back and opened one gate.

This blog is about us, Tom and Jan.
After a decade of travelling from 'down-under' every two years to spend a brief few weeks having a wonderful canal holiday we decided to eliminate the travel and do it full time on retirement. In 2011 we moved to the UK and built Waiouru before spending 6 wonderful years cruising.
In 2017 we sold our lovely boat and moved back to Perth, West Australia where other adventures are on the 'bucket list'.